[phs]

> Contrary to what we expected (and probably contrary to what you expected as well!), masking gender had no effect on interview performance with respect to any of the scoring criteria (would advance to next round, technical ability, problem solving ability).

Or here's another hot take: the masking did not work. What if there is more gender signal in speech than just in voice pitch?

I don't see any mention of explicitly asking interviewers what gender they perceived the interviewee to be, and with what confidence.

[Manuel_D]

As per the article:

> You might ask why we included the second condition, i.e. modulated interviews that didn’t change the interviewee’s pitch. As you probably noticed, if you played the videos above, the modulated one sounds fairly processed. The last thing we wanted was for interviewers to assume that any processed-sounding interviewee must summarily have been the opposite gender of what they sounded like. So we threw that condition in as a further control.

It wouldn't affect things like cadence, but they did include a modulated (but not cross gender) control group.

[benjaminl]

Yeah, pitch is only one of the components of speech pattern differences between genders. Others include resonance, intonation, rhythm and more.

Ask a trans person and they will tell you that changing your perceived speech gender is much more than just the pitch.

[whoIsYou]

Here's another hot take: no amount of evidence will dissuade someone from believing a narrative they want to believe, no matter how compelling the evidence

[collegeburner]

i agree the masking was not sufficient. there's no sample of how a masked man's voice sounds but tbh i'd have guessed stereotypical gay male for the masked woman.

like when i talk vs. my female peers i notice my voice doesn't rise in pitch at the end of a phrase, or go creaky. i also notice differences in word choice: it's crazy the number of people i hear saying "perfect" instead of just "thanks" when i send over a document, and definitely more women doing that than men. they also seem to qualify their words more with "i think" or "maybe" preceding a statement.

anyway i'm guessing i could do an ok job of guessing male vs female with them modulated like this.